Image ModifiedPage and Space blueprints are a great tool to structure information in Confluence. They support teams to create pages and spaces with focusing on the content, less on the structure, not on the layout. With this tool new pages and whole spaces can be created with wizards in very little time.
...
| Section |
|---|
|
To create a blueprint you need to touch a number of files. - There is the XML file containing the template,
- the Soy file to specify the wizard.
- A JavaScript file for the validators for the wizard,
- probably a Java file to manipulate the blueprint context.
- Add localized resource files for one or more languages,
- create one or more index pages,
- and finally a number of edits to the
atlassian-plugin.xml file.
| Note Box |
|---|
For projectdoc we also generate blueprints to create index pages (should you get lost of the doctypes homepage), special pages (such as - and currently the only one) content management homepage, which is a view for authors on the documents, and finally a blueprint that creates all pages of a space in an already existing page. Since these are considered as basic support they are created automatically. |
So the basic course of events is this: | Code Block |
|---|
| language | text |
|---|
| theme | Midnight |
|---|
| > mvn doctype:create
-DshortId=services
-DprojectName="Service Management Doctypes"
-DprojectDescription="Provides Blueprints for System Management."
-DcreateExamples=false
> [add your descriptor files]
> mvn doctype:generate
> atlas-run |
| Tip Box |
|---|
If you start from new you probably would like to have some example files and your are probably not that fancy to specify a nice name and description. In this case use the following: | Code Block |
|---|
| language | text |
|---|
| theme | Midnight |
|---|
| > mvn doctype:create -DshortId=services my-sandbox
> mvn doctype:generate
> atlas-debug |
The project has configured quick reload. |
|
...
| Section |
|---|
|
We started our internal beta (although the sources are already published on Bitbucket) to check how it is working. Needless to say that at this early stage it has some limitations: - The syntax for defining sections is not final - property values (with alternate forms as seen above) and whole sections (without alternatives if you need to specify more than a placeholder) are specified in their storage format within an
xml element - Only one space blueprint can be defined
- There are grammatical problems with the boiler plate texts (especially in German), so there is the need to run over the generated localization bundles
- No roundtrip: You should not need to edit the generated files (or if you do, should not use the descriptor again)
- Very simple wizards currently
- No support to add CSS or JavaScript
- Currently the localized resources need to be written to the descriptor
- There is also a redundancy specifying the central base templates - but you won't see this until you need to create your own base template
We'll work to improve the tools to remove these limitations. |
| Section |
|---|
|
As stated above the tools have some rough edges. So we need to run this internally first. If you are interested to use this tool, it is available at Bitbucket and available from our Nexus server. Please check out the documention documentation for the DTSMP and do to get everything set up. Do not hesitate to get in touch, if you have questions or are being interested in this topic! |
